About the SCL

Welcome to the home page of the Systemic Cognition Lab (SCL) at the Department of Psychology, Kingston University. Our laboratory is dedicated to the systemic study of higher cognition, including problem-solving, reasoning, judgement and decision-making.

Traditional accounts of human thinking, reasoning, and decision-making have situated knowledge and understanding—cognition—within individuals’ mind or “inside the skull” as it were. In our lab, by contrast, we adopt a systemic view of cognition based on investigating how action shapes the experience of thinking. This entails a reconceptualization of cognition as achieved through the close coupling of internal or mental representations and possible operations together with external or material presentations and possible physical actions people can carry out. Operating within such an extended cognitive system enables people to exceed the capacities of their mental resources since the coupling of physical activity with mental processing augments both the quality and efficiency of thinking. This suggests that levels of performance observed in environments that offer reduced opportunities for coupling thinking with physical actions may be unrepresentative of individuals’ true abilities. In other words, the systemic perspective calls for a careful examination, not only of reasoners’ mental resources and processing abilities, but also of their immediate material environment and the opportunities (or lack thereof) it offers to support and transform their cognitive efforts.

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Featured Posts

Research from the SysCog lab was showcased at the 39th annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society held in London in July 2017. Emma Henderson presented her work on interactivity and planning and Fred presented a paper on insight problem solving and ego depletion. Planning in Action: Interactivity Improves Planning Performance Emma Henderson, Gaëlle Vallée-Tourangeau, […]

The first edition of the Systemic Cognition symposium took place at the Kingston Business School on Tuesday July 25 2017. The symposium was co-organized by the Systemic Cognition lab (https://syscoglab.com/, Department of Psychology) and the Decisions, Attitudes, Risk and Thinking research group (https://dartresearch.org/, Department of Management). The symposium explored the theoretical and methodological challenges arising […]